Reuters News

(Reuters) – A year ago, Mike Maples’s investment firm, Floodgate, was investing in young companies at a pace of two or three every quarter. Now, he’s backed just one startup all year and puts a big chunk of the blame on spiraling price tags. “Relative to the risk I have to take, I can’t justify […]

(Reuters) – A booming IPO market and the lure of high returns kept China’s private equity sector humming in the first half, stoking fear of asset bubbles amid rising concerns over the quality of listed Chinese companies. Fifty private equity funds raised $14.54 billion in China in the first half, doubling the amount raised during […]

(Reuters) – Facebook will integrate Skype video chat into its social networking service, striking a deal to cement its role as a hub for communications. The agreement, announced by Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg at the company’s Palo Alto, California, headquarters on Wednesday, deepens its cooperation with Microsoft Corp, which is in the process of […]

(Reuters) – New Enterprise Associates (NEA), a leading venture capital firm, said on Wednesday it will stick to its business plan in China despite scandals involving some overseas-listed Chinese companies as negative sentiment has been overblown. NEA plans to list one of its China portfolio companies in the United States this year and will submit […]

SUN VALLEY, Idaho, July 5 (Reuters) – Media and technology moguls gather in Idaho this week to once more debate a shift to a digital world, but the talk this year will finally focus on how to make money off it. Unlike in years past, this year’s attendees at the Allen & Co conference in […]

(Reuters) – Microblogging service Twitter is seeking to raise “hundreds of millions of dollars” in a new funding round, according to the Wall Street Journal. The new round values the company at as much as $7 billion, the newspaper reported, around the same as recent transactions in Twitter stock on the secondary market. “We don’t […]

(Reuters) – If private equity firms had their way, Hewlett-Packard Co would look less like a monolithic tanker and more like a small fleet of streamlined schooners. Private equity firms including Blackstone Group, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and TPG Capital would like HP to break up and sell them some of its unit, arguing that the […]

SAO PAULO (Reuters) – BTG Pactual, Brazil’s biggest independent securities firm, raised $1.6 billion for a private equity fund as it expands investment in nonfinancial industries, BTG’s merchant banking chief told Reuters. More than half the capital of the BTG Pactual Brazil Investment I fund comes from investors in the United States, Europe, Asia and […]

(Reuters) - Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams plan to revive Obvious, the company they conceived years ago as a technology project incubator that eventually spawned Twitter. Stone and Williams will continue to advise Twitter on strategic matters, but devote the lions' share of their time to The Obvious Corporation, Stone told the Aspen Ideas Conference at the ski resort on Tuesday. The pair, along with others such as Jack Dorsey, who now runs payments service Square, created the four-year-old website that allows users to send 140-character messages across the Internet. It has grown into a microblogging phenomenon used by celebrities and heads of state alike, hailed at times as a crucial tool in promoting

(Reuters) – Google Inc, frustrated by a string of failed attempts to crack social networking, is taking another stab at fending off Facebook and other hot social sites with a new service called Google Plus. Google designed the service, unveiled on Tuesday, to tie together all of its online properties, laying the foundation for a […]